Youngsville puppet-maker practices ancient art

Published: Sunday, July 21, 2013 at 8:00 a.m.

Last Modified: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 at 11:26 a.m.

YOUNGSVILLE — A stroll through Alice Wallace’s home in rural Lafayette Parish is an exercise in ducking under and stepping around wooden characters.

There are puppets everywhere: big ones hanging from a living room rafter; bigger ones suspended from the walls; scary monsters staring at visitors in the bathroom; Indonesian rod puppets propped against the walls.

The Youngsville woman estimates she has 300 puppets. Some she bought online or at trade shows in locales like Seattle, the others she made.

“The place is a museum,” Wallace said, showing off intricately made marionettes, stick and hand puppets.

A portable puppet theater in the living room is too heavy for the 66-year-old former school teacher to move.

In a bedroom sits an old black Singer sewing machine where she stitches clothing for puppets she makes. In her backyard is a tiny shop where she carves wood into legs and arms and, most important, distinctive heads.

Wallace, owner of Hobgoblin Hill Puppets, and her troupe perform at Louisiana festivals. Former students have come and gone through the years as troupe members. Currently, Wallace has two partners.

She said that in the spring it’s the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Festival International in Lafayette. In the fall the main festival is the Louisiana Renaissance Festival in Hammond. In between the troupe performs at smaller venues such as public libraries.

Wallace said she doesn’t have much competition in Louisiana when it comes to other puppet troupes.

Hobgoblin Hills and Wallace offered an eight-day puppetry course for adults at the Cité des Arts this month, but there were no takers.

Wallace said she thought adults would be eager to learn. “There must be teachers, there must be parents who want to learn,” she said.

She said it could be a lack of interest but acknowledged that it could have been the $200 she was advised to charge.

Puppetry dates back 23,000 years, and puppets are among the oldest discovered man-made objects, according to library.thinkquest.org

More recently, Jim Henson notched a place for puppetry in America with the creation of “The Muppets.” In 1940, Walt Disney released “Pinocchio,” about the living marionette created by Italian writer Carlo Collodi.

Wallace is a retired St. Martin Parish public school teacher of English and German. Her disappointment in the lack of course takers this month brightened when she recently provided a lesson on puppets, their magic, and those who bring them to life.

YaYa Coulibali, of Mali — “He’s the greatest puppet maker in Africa” — made a 2-foot-tall marionette in her collection.

Another marionette represents the devil Mephistopheles from Goethe’s “Faust,” which she and her troupe have performed. “Everybody who saw that never was the same,” she said.

The direction in modern puppetry is toward new characters, new themes, new things, she said, then shook her head.

“I tend to go back to antiquity,” she said, and pointed to another puppet, Petrushka, a character from a 100-year-old Russian ballet based on a puppet.

“(Petrushka) beats up a lot of people in the course of the play,” Wallace said.

Another wooden puppet is based on St. Anthony the Great.

“Every night he was tormented by demons,” she said.

Wallace became interested in puppets late in life. She said that in 1987, as her mother was sick with emphysema, Wallace realized she wanted to do more.

She took up Taekwondo and puppetry, and excelled at both. As the years went by, Wallace said, her interest in both never waned. But the rigors of martial arts took a toll on her body that puppetry did not.

Wallace has sold very few of the puppets she’s made, only those “that don’t have a part in a play.”

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